Brandywine School

However, he was dissatisfied with the confines of formal art education, and beginning in 1898, he began teaching students during the summers at the Turner Mill in Chadds Ford.

[5] In order to develop that intrinsically American style, Pyle believed that his students must spend time outdoors, taking in the scenery and the history of their country.

Pyle continued to operate the school until 1910, during which time he was mentor to such successful artists as N. C. Wyeth, Frank E. Schoonover, Stanley M. Arthurs, William James Aylward, Thornton Oakley, Violet Oakley, Clifford Ashley, Anna Whelan Betts, Ethel Franklin Betts, Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle, Jessie Willcox Smith, Olive Rush, Blanche Grant, Philip R. Goodwin, Allen Tupper True, and Harvey Dunn.

In 1905, Wilmington philanthropist Samuel Bancroft constructed a set of buildings to house and provide studios for four of Pyle's most successful students: Wyeth, Schoonover, Dunn, and Ashley.

In his study The Brandywine Tradition (1968), author and illustrator Henry Clarence Pitz wrote of the movement's "concern for human values, .

delight in the exercise of the pictorial imagination, the feeling that design should follow the behest of content and the conviction that the illustrator has a power over and a responsibility to his audience.